This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Have you kept up with me so far? In the first two chapters, you've set
your computer and operating system and discovered the neat, orderly Mac desktop,
which is designed to mimic a typical office desk in terms of layout.

On your computer screen, you see a visual representation of what you want (an
icon), and you use your mouse or keyboard to select and work with that item. In
this chapter you will learn how to interact with windows, folders, files, and
applications.

Windows

While Finder windows were introduced in the last chapter during our
discussion of the file system, here we are going to take an up-close look at
windows and their use. Basically, windows are holders that appear on your
desktop to display whatever you are working on. Finder windows contain listings
of folder, files and applications, while application windows provide a workspace
where you can write a document, view an image, or do whatever it is the
application was designed for.

To make an open window active, you click it (it makes the title black and brings
it to the front). Every time you open a folder or drive of any kind (including
your hard drive as we discussed in the last chapter) by double-clicking it,
it opens a Finder display window (see Figure
3.1). The one I'm showing here is the icon view.

Close/Minimize/Zoom

In the upper-left corner of each window are the Close (red x), Minimize
(yellow ), and Zoom (green +) buttons. Differentiated only by color and
position, the corresponding symbol appears in each button when the mouse cursor
nears.

NOTE

If you choose the Graphite appearance option in the General panel in the
System Preferences icon, you won't see the colors. Regardless of the
appearance choice you make, when you move your mouse over a button, you'll
see an "x" appear in the Close button, a "-" in the Minimize
button and a "+" in the Maximize button to remind you of what it
does.

Clicking the Close button closes the open window. The Mac OS X Minimize
button shrinks the window into an icon view and places it in the Dock. This icon
is a miniature of the original windowdown to the items it contains. In
some cases, the icon even updates its appearance when the parent application
generates new output. Clicking the icon in the Dock restores the window to its
original position and size on the screen.

NOTE

When you close a document window, you aren't closing the program. The
program remains active until you choose Quitfrom the application
menuor the File menu in a Classic Mac OS applicationor press
Command-Q.

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Double-clicking the title bar of a window has the same effect as clicking the
Minimize button. The window shrinks to fit in the Dock.

NOTE

The keyboard shortcut Command-M also minimizes the current window and reduces
it to an icon on the right side of the Dock (M = minimize). To make a minimized
icon larger again, just click once on that icon in the Dock.

The Zoom button (usually) opens the window to the size necessary to display
the available information. Most Windows PC users expect the maximized window to
fill the entire screen. However, if there are only three icons to be shown, Mac
OS X doesn't waste space by filling up your window with blank space.

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Holding down Option while clicking the Minimize or Close button results in
all the windows in the current application being minimized or closed.

Hide/Show Toolbar

In the upper-right corner of some windows (including the windows for the Finder
and applications such as Mail and Preview, which we'll look at in some
later chapters) is an elongated button, called Hide/Show Toolbar, that can be
used to quickly show or hide special toolbars in the top of the application
window. The result of hiding the toolbar in the Mail application is shown in
Figure 3.2.

Figure
3.2 With the task toolbar hidden, the window occupies less screen space.

NOTE

Apple advocates toolbars in applications to increase usability and
efficiency. However, because individual developers must write their programs to
support the toolbar button, you shouldn't expect all applications with
toolbars to have the Hide/Show Toolbar button.

The toolbar version of the Finder window provides several useful controls for
viewing and navigating your files.

In the upper-left corner of the toolbar are the Back and Forward
arrowsclick it to return to the previous folder. Using this technique, you
can dig many levels deep into the file system, and then quickly back out by
using the Back button. The Forward arrow enables you to follow the same path
back to inner levels.

By default, there are several other elements in the toolbar, as shown in
Figure 3.1. From left to right, you see the View selector, buttons to Computer,
Home, Favorites, and Applications, and the Search text entry field.

NOTE

Separate from the Finder toolbar is the status bar, which shows the number of
items in a folder and the amount of space available on the drive. The status bar
can be toggled on and off by using the Show/Hide Status Bar command in the
Finder's View menu. The status bar can also contain one of two icons in the
left corner of the bar: a grid pattern that indicates use of the snap-to-grid
function, and a pencil with a slash through it that indicates a folder is
read-only.

Finder Window View Options

Let's take a look at the view options for Finder windows. Three buttons
in the View selector enable you to control the way information is displayed in
the Finder window.

Icon View

The first time you log in, the Finder is in toolbar mode and using Icon view.
If you've already been using the Finder and are no longer in Icon view, you
can quickly switch to Icon view by choosing As Icons from the View menu or by
clicking the first button in the View selector of the toolbar. Figure 3.1 shows
the Finder window in Icon view. In Icon view mode, you can navigate through the
folders on your drive by double-clicking them.

List View

The next view to explore is the Finder's List view. You can switch to
List view by clicking the middle button in the Finder's View selector or,
if the toolbar isn't present, by choosing As List from the Finder's
View menu. Demonstrated in Figure 3.3,
the List view is a straightforward means of displaying all available information
about a file or folder in tabular form.

Figure
3.3 List view packs a lot of information into a small amount of space.

The columns in the List view represent the attributes for each file. Clicking
a column highlights it and sorts the file listing based on that column's
values. For example, if you want to locate the most recent files in a folder,
you can view the folder contents in List view and click the Date Modified
header. By default, the column values are listed in descending order. Clicking a
column header again reverses the sorting order. An arrow pointing up or down at
the right of each column indicates the current sort order.

You can change the width of the columns by placing the mouse cursor at the
edge of the column and click-dragging to the left or right. You can reposition
the columns by clicking and dragging them into the order you want. However, the
first column, Name, cannot be repositioned.

When a folder appears in the file listing, a small disclosure triangle
precedes its name. Clicking the triangle reveals the file hierarchy within that
folder. As with Icon view, double-clicking a folder anywhere in this view either
opens a new window (if you're in toolbar-less mode) or refreshes the
contents of the existing window with the new location.

Column View

Unlike other views, which can either overwhelm you with information or
require multiple windows to move easily from point to point, the Column view is
designed with one thing in mind: ease of navigation.

The concept is very simple: Click an item in the first column and its contents
are shown in the next column. Click a folder in this new column and its contents
are shown in the next column, and so on. Figure
3.4 shows a multicolumn display that reaches down two levels.

Figure
3.4 Using the Column view, you can easily navigate through the folders on
your hard drive.

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If you use the horizontal scrollbar to move back along a path, the folders
you've chosen remain highlighted in the columns. You can, at any time,
choose a different folder from any of the columns. This refreshes the column to
the right of your choice. There's no need to start from the beginning every
time you want to change your location.

One big bonus of using Column view is the ability to instantly see the
contents of a file without opening it. If you choose a file or application, a
preview or description of the selected item appears in the column to the right.
For an example, take a look at the far right column in Figure 3.4, where a
representation of an image file is displayed. When you choose an application or
a file that cannot be previewed, only information about the file is displayed,
such as the creation/modification dates, size, and version.

Show View Options

For each of the three Finder window views, there are additional settings that
you can customize by choosing Show View Options from the View menu. You can also
choose whether your changes apply to the current window only or to all Finder
windows.

For Icon view, you can scale icons from the smallest to largest size by
dragging the Icon Size slider from the left to the right. You can choose how the
icon is labeled, including the font size and label placement. You can set how
the icons are arranged and what color the window background is.

List view enables you to choose small or larger icons, text size, and which
columns of information to display with the filenames.

Column view gives you options for text size and whether to include icons in
the preview column. There are no global settings for this view.

Customizing Toolbar Shortcuts

You can customize your Finder toolbar by adding other predefined Mac OS X
shortcuts or by removing the default items in this way:

Choose Customize Toolbar from the View menu.

From the window containing all the available shortcuts (shown in Figure
3.5), locate the item you want to add.

Add a shortcut by dragging it from the window to wherever you want it to
appear on the toolbar.

In addition to these predefined options, users can define their own
shortcuts. To do this, simply drag common applications, documents, and folders
to any place on the toolbar.

NOTE

When you modify your toolbar, it's modified for all Finder windows in
your workspace, not just the currently open folder. However, the changes that
you make to your toolbar don't affect other user accounts on the same
computer.

When folders and applications are added to the toolbar, a single click on the
icon opens or launches the selected item. Users can also drag documents onto an
application icon or folder icon in the toolbar to open the file by using the
application or to move the file into a folder.

Window Scrolling, Moving, and Resizing

Because windows can't always to be large enough to show everything
inside them at once, they support a feature called scrolling. Scrolling allows
you move the viewable area of a window's contents by moving up and down (or
left and right). The tools that allow scrolling appear on the left for
vertically scrolling and on the bottom for horizontal scrolling. Here is a
description of each:

Scroll arrowClick it to move up or down slightly through a
directory or document window. Hold down the mouse when clicking an arrow to get
a continuous motion.

ScrollbarClick and drag on this bar to move back and forth
through your folder list or document. The distance you can move depends on how
big the listing or document is.

Draggable areaThis is the place where you can drag the
scrollbar (see following). If the area is white rather than blue (and the
scrollbar isn't there), it means that the entire window is displayed on
your screen and there's nothing to scroll to. You'll notice that
there's both a horizontal and vertical draggable area.

Another characteristic of Mac OS X windows is the borderless content area.
As shown in Figure 3.6, the display in
most Mac OS X application windows stretches to the edge of the content window.
In contrast, some operating systems such as Mac OS 9 and Windows offer window
borders for dragging.

Just hold down the Command key and click a title and you'll see a little
pop-up menu that shows you a list of all the folders where the item is located
(sometimes called a folder hierarchy).

To resize a window, click and drag the resize icon in the lower-right corner
of each window. Many applications in Mac OS X take advantage of live resizing;
that is, as you resize the window, its contents adjust in real-time (such as Web
pages in Internet Explorer). However, unless you have a fast computer, live
resizing can be slow.

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There are a few new tricks you can use when working with Mac OS X windows. If
you hold down the Command key, you can drag inactive windows located behind
other windows. If fact, holding down Command enables you to click buttons and
move scrollbars in many background applications.

Another fun trick is holding down the Option key while clicking on an
inactive application's window. This hides the frontmost application and
brings the clicked application to the front.

Finally, rather than switching to another window to close, minimize, or
maximize it, positioning your cursor over the appropriate window controls
highlights themenabling you to get rid of obtrusive windows without
leaving your current workspace.

Window Widgets

In addition to scrollbars and resize boxes, there are several other interface
controls you need to know about. We'll call them window widgets.
Samples of many of the Mac OS X Aqua window widgets are shown in Figure
3.7.

PushbuttonsPushbuttons are rendered as translucent white or
aqua ovals with appropriate label text. They're typically used to activate
a choice or to respond to a question posed by the operating system or
application. The default choice, which is activated by pressing the Enter key,
pulses for easy visual confirmation.

Check boxes/radio buttonsCheck boxes are used to choose
multiple attributes (AND), whereas radio buttons are used to choose between
attributes (OR).

List viewsClicking a category, such as the Date Modified
heading shown in Figure 3.7, sorts by that selection. Clicking the category
again reverses the direction of the sort (ascending to descending or vice
versa). To resize category headings, click the edge of the heading and drag in
the direction you want to shrink or expand the column.

Pop-up menus/system menusSingle-clicking a menu drops
down the menu until you make a selection. The menu can stay down indefinitely.
With Mac OS X's multitasking system, other applications can continue to
work in the background while the menu is down.

Disclosure trianglesDisclosure triangles continue to work as
they always have. Click the triangle to reveal additional information about an
object.

Disclosure pushbuttonsLike disclosure triangles, these
pushbuttons are used to reveal all possible options (a full, complex view) or to
reduce a window to a simplified representation. They are used in the new File
Save sheets.

ScrollbarsScrollbars visually represent the amount of data
in the current document by changing the size of the scrollbar slider in relation
to the data to display. The larger the slider, the less data there is to scroll
through. The smaller the slider, the more information there is to
display.

TabsTabs separate settings within a single window into
categories by their functions, and you can see different options in each tab. By
breaking up long lists in this way, windows with many options are less
overwhelming, but you might have to click between tabs to find the control
options you're looking for.

Sheet Windows and Window Trays

Two unique interface elements are sheets and window trays. Normally, when a
computer wants to get your attention, it displays a dialog box containing a
question such as, "Do you want to save this document?". If you have 10
open documents on your system, how do you know which one needs to be saved?

Sheet windows are used in place of such traditional dialog boxes. Sheets connect
directly to the title bar of an open window. As shown in Figure
3.8, these messages appear inside the window they're associated with,
so you'll be able to tell what the question you're answering will
affect.

Sheets are used just like regular dialog boxes, except that they're
attached to a document. Unlike many dialog boxes, which keep you from
interacting with the rest of the system until you attend to them, sheets limit
access only to the window in which they appear.

A window tray is an interface element that can be used by software programmers.
A tray is used to store commonly used settings and options that might need to
be accessed while a program is running. Figure
3.9 shows the Mail application's window tray holding a list of active
mailboxes.

Figure
3.9 Window trays hold options that are needed often during a program's
execution.

To use active trays in applications that support their use, you typically
click a button in the toolbar. After a tray is open, you can drag its edge to
change the tray's size.

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By default, the tray slides out from the right of the main window after you
click a button to activate it. If the window is too close to the side of the
screen, the tray is either forced out on the other side of the window or pushes
the main window over to make room.

Now that we're comfortable with what windows can do, let's take a
look at folders.